sarahmichelef

I keep misplacing articles. Fortunately just about everything I use is available online, but it's still annoying to have to go back and relocate and reprint it. And I know that as soon as I do that, I'm going to FIND the articles. I need some lackey to catalog all of my stuff and keep it organized for me. Follow me around picking up pieces of paper I leave lying around and putting them where I'll be able to find them the next time I need them.

On the other hand, I've now got things set up so that I can print duplex with a minimum of fuss (still a two-step process, but a simple one).

after my attacks of stupid and techno-hate...

• Left a message to set up TRex's first-ever dentist's appointment (won't that be fun!).
  
• Dudes are coming to (finally) change the locks on our house next Wednesday. We decided that we liked the original 1950 hardware on our front door more than we cared about it being on the same key as the back doors.
  
• Purchased plane tickets for TRex and me to go to OK for the first bit of spring break. They were remarkably reasonably priced, too! It's sad when tickets on United cost $250 less than Southwest AND have better flight times (though the latter of those is not all that surprising). My loyalty to Orbitz cost me a dollar - I could have had the same tickets from either Expedia or CheapTickets (which I think might have been swallowed by Orbitz - the site layouts are identical now). I'm sure we'll manage to amuse ourselves for 3 hours in O'Hare on the way there. It was that or be on a 6:30 am flight out, and I didn't want to mess with that.
  
• Read over the notes that I was mad about not being able to print. Percolating exactly how I'm going to write the theoretical section of the diss. *hate*
  
• M made the tactical error of sending me a link to a bunch of refurb stuff that Apple has on sale. *lust* Another low-end iBook (1.5 GHz, 512 MB, 60 GB, combo drive, airport extreme, etc.) would last me another 4 years (which is how long I've had X^2), I'm sure of it.
  

Thinking about the possibility of a new computer makes me wonder... Wherein lies the soul of a computer? When X's HD died in September 2004, I changed her name to X^2. Does the identity of the computer lie in the hard drive, as this would imply? Or is it somewhere else?

What does this tell us about the seat of human identity?

Damn... I didn't intend for this to get all philosophical. Back to your regularly-scheduled Friday afternoon.

Somebody needs to write up Human Subjects forms that are appropriate for sociological research. I don't want to lock people in a room and tell them to push the button. I don't want to put one of their arms in a cast so I can study muscular degeneration (there actually was such a study at UMass a couple of years ago). I don't want to give them experimental drugs, take their blood, or mess with their heads. I simply want to ask them some questions about how they think about public and private.

But the forms that I have to fill out, even just for my departmental IRB (since my project is un-sponsored), make NO SENSE in the context of what I want to do. For example, my research is considered "non-beneficial." You'd think that non-beneficial would be, you know, a bad thing. But in my case, it just means that no individual person is going to get healthier as a result of participating in my study.

Rargh. Rargh, I say.

Be Data for someone other than me!